


Happy Endings

by baranduin



Series: No Night Is Too Long [2]
Category: No Night is Too Long (2002)
Genre: Angst, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-14
Updated: 2010-01-14
Packaged: 2017-10-06 06:26:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 847
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/50677
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/baranduin/pseuds/baranduin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is more movie-verse (as far as I can remember movie-verse, that's fading fast :-) with respect how the movie ends. Tim feels very very guilty about how things have worked out.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Happy Endings

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the fanfic100 challenge, prompt #3: Ends.

Ivo is dead.

This time it's true, and it's my fault again though apparently I'm not to be held criminally responsible for my actions. But it is all my fault, and the long chain of events started that day on the island when I ran away and left him for dead and it wasn't so.

I suppose this is the end of it finally, not that it will ever really be over for me while I still live and breathe, not when I can still see Ivo walking away from the house the other night, wearing that jacket.

Crouched here in the increasing gloom and quiet of the foyer (except for the knocking), I keep thinking about beginnings and endings and love. Bits of T.S. Eliot have been running through my head, all that stuff about in my end is my beginning though doesn't that really come down to Mary Queen of Scots and her beheading? I think so though I haven't got the energy to get up and look it up. Instead, I just keep sitting here on the floor while Isabel keeps knocking and calling to me, and I'm telling myself that every rap on the door is another nail in the strength of my new intention to own up to it all, even though that no longer means I'm to be shut away in some official jail. No, owning up this time means not answering the door to her. Ever.

And my stupid, butterfly mind keeps flitting from bits of poetry to pieces from favorite novels. A time like this and my mind can't manage to stay on the topic directly, it must keep moving about and trying to make lyrical connections, no doubt to excuse myself. But I won't have it, I won't allow those connections.

Damn it.

There is this novel, a favorite of mine, and I'm not going to read it again soon, I really am not. As a matter of fact, I think I shall throw it away, or at least I should throw it away. It's called _The Magus_ and it's about a not very nice young man and some rather bizarre adventures he has on a remote Greek island, where peculiar things happen to him with respect to life and love. As the story progresses, he grows more and more confused. I have read this book many times. In the preface to a revised edition, the author referred to it as being an essentially juvenile piece of work, in other words, a piece of work that appeals to those who prefer the fantasy of what is around the corner to the actuality of what is before one's eyes and within one's reach. I tried to explain why I loved this book to Ivo once, but I stopped when that sardonic look came into his eyes and I could sense some lecture looming over me that I really did not care to hear.

One of the things about the book that most appealed to me was the mystery of the ending. The two main characters are walking off together, it is fall and a bit bleak with wet leaves on the pavement, and you're not really sure whether they're going to separate once they reach the end of the block or whether they're going to continue on as a pair. The very end of the book consists of a Latin couplet that for years I never quite could translate to my satisfaction. I knew it had something to do with love, but my Latin wasn't up to understanding it completely. But the word love appeared in multiple forms in these two lines, and several years after I'd read the novel for the first time, I ran across the couplet in a book of famous quotations. Here is what the Latin meant:

> Tomorrow let him love, who has never loved;   
> he who has loved, let him love tomorrow.

So in the end, there was a ray of hopefulness waiting for the couple, nothing definite but _something_ there other than absolute separation and silence. But Nicholas (the anti-hero of the story) never killed anyone, so perhaps he deserved the possibility of a happy ending. For myself, I've got to hold tight to my resolution, that's my only possibility, it must be.

And anyway, it's futile to try to make connections and comparisons where they really don't fit. Books aren't life, things don't work out that neatly, there is no magical epiphany that fixes everything and smooths the way to a rainbow happy ending. Plus, I can't really concentrate on these thoughts any more, not with the knocking going on and on and on. It's odd, Isabel knocks quite like Ivo did. There's something about the sound and rhythm of it that is so terribly similar, rather like the tired look about their eyes was similar.

But Isabel is here and alive though I'll never open that door, and Ivo isn't here any longer and he's never going to be as much as I wish it to be otherwise.

Oh, Ivo.


End file.
